The Ecological Footprint metric shows how much nature we use compared to how much nature we have.

New global study finds gadfly petrels moult during breeding and migration in warm, unproductive seas, reshaping our understanding of seabird vulnerability at sea

Testing programmes affected include those monitoring the impact of drought.

Although 10 000 steps per day can still be a viable target for those who are more active, 7000 steps per day is associated with clinically meaningful improvements in health outcomes and might be a mor...

Too often, nature is treated as a constraint to development. The prime minister’s comments earlier this year about the impact of bat conservation on the completion of HS2, sparked frustration within the conservation community, as this unhelpfully framed nature as being in conflict with economic growth.

New plans to address the presence of chemicals from flea and tick treatments in rivers and streams across the UK have been unveiled today

When the government of Sri Lanka published the  National Red List of threatened plants in 2020, my eyebrows shot up. We’ve all become accustomed, after all, to the grim news these reports…

Collecting arthropod samples is usually very invasive because these organisms die during sampling, and it is hard to obtain a statistically robust sample. The availability of arthropods is critical for the survival of the youngest White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) nestlings and impacting the productivity of this species populations; thus, the species is a strong predator of a variety of epigeic insects. At the time of progressive drying of climatic conditions due to climate change or/and in dry habitats replacing wetlands, the role of termophilic taxa as certain Coleoptera in nestling diet is often underestimated. Here, we evaluated the Coleopteran component of the diet of the White Stork nestlings using the nest lining material consisting of fragmented remains of regurgitated pellets and soil-like material, and related the community indices of Coleopteran fauna to the landscape structure within a radius of 2.5 km around nests. In eight nests collected in SE Poland, we found a massive accumulation of beetle remains representing 32,277 individual Coleopteran prey items, from which 17,252 were identified to the family level. Our analysis showed a significant relationship between the landscape structure and beetle communities, as well as the abundance of dominant prey taxa and the share of three major functional guilds (herbivores, scavengers, and predators). The significant contribution of scavengers was associated with a high proportion of forests around the nest and decreased with increasing proportion of arable lands and mixed crops, while the high proportion of herbivorous and predatory beetles was associated with a high share of arable lands. We showed that the analysis of nest lining material, mainly the remains of pellets, provides taxonomically informative data on beetle communities and can be a valuable tool in bioindicative assessments of Coleopteran biodiversity. Given the widespread nesting of White Stork near landfills (increasing the productivity of their local populations), further studies assessing the role of the Coleopteran component, particularly the contribution of necrophagous or saprophagous beetles, in the diet of early nestlings of this bird species are essential.